JAMB and Nigerian students since 1978

I found the Editorial of the Nigerian Tribune of August 9, 2022 instructive as it touches the base of Nigerian youths’  disagreement with the government on the focus of the country’s education policy. Since the establishment of the Joint Administrations and Matriculation Board, JAMB, in 1978, the exam body has not found acceptance in the minds of some Nigerians. This could be linked to the mass failure recorded yearly from its Unified Tertiary Matriculation Exam (UTME). It is an examination that cannot be easily exposed to ‘expo’: your hard work and knowledge is what gets you through, unlike other exams that are known to have miracle centres where every Tom, Dick and Harry can enroll and come out in flying colors.

Needless to say, the JAMB examination, despite serving a great purpose in filtering qualified candidates for tertiary institutions’ admission, is still fraught with some errors of administration. The migration of JAMB from its pioneering method of hand-written objective exam to the Computer-Based Test system (CBT) indicates a positive evolution. Sadly, certain hitches that were not recorded previously are gradually popping up, like candidates showing up for exams and not being able to partake in the exams due to errors in their biometrics. It is worthy of note that certain guidelines have been set by JAMB itself to avoid having such technical challenges like stopping ladies from applying henna (local tattoo) on their hands, so as not to prevent the biometric capturing of their fingerprints.

Now, has anyone ever given a thought to the registration fees JAMB collects to enroll candidates for its UTME? Though JAMB is not a revenue agency according to a school of thought, I ask: why the need for JAMB to consistently register candidates yearly for its exam if the government is not to expect profit from it? Thousands of candidates register for the exam yearly. They include applicants for federal and state-owned universities, polytechnics, together with other private tertiary institutions. If JAMB makes billions in profit for conducting examinations and millions for correcting minor mistakes on its portal, then it has become a part of the problem.All said and done, there is an urgent need for this agency to reinvent itself in order to fulfil the purpose for which it was established. In a country that claims to practise federalism, there is absolutely no reason for the status quo to remain. We should not centralise the admission process into tertiary institutions that were not set up or funded by the Federal Government.

It is totally illogical for a federal agency to control and dictate the procedure for admission into state and private universities. But until the law establishing JAMB is tinkered with, we are stuck for now, which is why this piece has been rendered to proffer solutions and remedies for an obviously flawed process. The Ministry of Education, which has supervisory jurisdiction over JAMB, should work out an efficient strategy that will reduce the multiple layers of money-gulping procedures of the agency in order to lessen the burden of the candidates and their parents. Education should ordinarily be an essential service which every nation should prioritise for the benefit of its citizens. This is a global phenomenon that should be in the interest of all stakeholders in the education sector. More importantly, however, the Federal Government must make conscious efforts to decentralise the process of admission into tertiary institutions, so that we can truly pride ourselves on running a federation.

Finally, there is a need for a response mechanism such that JAMB as an agency can receive constant feedback from all those who are affected one way or the other, with the conduct of its affairs. The primary concern should be the interest of the candidates for whose benefit the agency was established in the first place. As a starting point, the fees being paid for examinations should cover all other protocols and procedures relating to or connected with the admission process. Parents who are financially distressed, parents who have been battered by the biting state of insecurity in the land, who have no hope of a better tomorrow, should not be subjected to the trauma of a cumbersome and prohibitive admission regime. That will be a disservice to education.

• Abbas is a Mass Communication student at Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, Kaduna State.